In Swiftnotes, colors serve as tags. You can’t filter information, but you can quickly identify notes of the same color. Coordinate colors to separate shopping lists from doctor’s appointments and quotes for your history paper.

A search function loads up notes that match keywords in the title or the body. Since Swiftnotes is running locally on your device, results pop up instantly.

When the time comes to switch phones, you can backup all your notes and restore them later. This is not the same as syncing data across devices, but it doesn’t come with concerns over privacy or control either.

2. Notepad

Notepad doesn’t feel as polished as Swiftnotes, but it adds extra features for users who find the latter too basic.

For starters, there’s basic formatting. You can make text bold, underline key words, or italicize distinctive phrases. This helps to differentiate words that would otherwise blend together.

When that’s not enough, you can change text color. Your options are black, red, blue, green, or yellow.

This app doesn’t stop with notes you type up. Sometimes a doodle gets the job done better. Here you can sketch a note or write with your fingertip. You won’t create works of art, but you can change the color and brush size.

3. Floating Stickies

Would you ever consider placing a sticky note on your monitor to help you remember? That could make you the kind of person who would love Floating Stickies. The app keeps a transparent sticky note on your screen at all times, so you don’t forget.

I’ll admit, the idea of this app would have driven me up the wall before. How can I use an app when a sticky note is taking up part of the screen? And this is a mobile app — it’s not like there’s much room to work with!

But now I find this app to be a great way to remember important things. I’m going to check my phone at several points throughout the day, and a floating sticky note will make sure I don’t forget what we need from the store.

Sticky notes aren’t only good for to-do lists. I use one as a reminder to stay positive or to carry around a phrase I read in a book that I want to commit to memory.

4. uNote

uNote isn’t the prettiest app. The interface does the bare minimal to feel modern, but not everyone needs their notes to look like Post-Its.

uNote’s notes each have a title and a body. There’s no formatting, doodling, or any other way to spice things up. Each entry appears in a straightforward list.

As boring as that sounds, there are reasons to check this app out. One is the option to search notes by title and content. Another is the inclusion of both creation date and modification date, so you know when you made each entry.

Then there’s the ability to password protect each note. Not only that, you can set individual passwords. If you want an extra layer of privacy, this may be the way to go.

5. Writeily Pro

Maybe you take serious notes. Some of these apps will work, but they’re less than ideal. When you’re poking out lengthy, heavily-formatted documents from your phone, you need something with a bit more umph.

Markdown is a great way to write for the web. When you’re done with a note, you can export to plain text, HTML, or an image. Then you can upload it to a blog.

The app intends for you to create a bunch of notes, so you have the option to make folders. And like with uNote, you can shield your notes from nosy individuals. This time you use a PIN instead of a traditional password.

I use Keep, and place it, with reminders option, as the default screen on my Note 5. With using of color options I don't 'forget important things anymore.
Not to mention Keep is on my smartwatch and my Chromebook too !

If you want to take notes and read them on multiple devices or take notes just on your phone with no worries about security, I recommend KeePass. It was originally designed as a password manager but it includes a note section in each entry which allows free form text. The entire file of entries is password protected and locally encrypted. You can store it in Dropbox without worries. I use it for notes like my familiy's SSNs as well as passwords. Go to the KeePass website ( http://keepass.info/index.html ) for more info and for ports for various phones (I use KeePass2Android).

That said, for most notes I find Keep to be just to convenient to ignore. From sharing a grocery list to photographing model and serial numbers to generating reminders, Google does it right.I only wish they'd let me display just the titles and add sort and search to lists.

Bertel both earned a college degree (in the humanities) and built a career using Linux-powered laptops. Now he uses his education and life experience to question the ethical decisions behind today's technology. He advocates the use of free software and believes computing should be accessible to all regardless of economic…